Congress on Vacation? Time for Us to Get to Work!

The prospect of Congress recessing without voting on health care reform is no reason to give up on getting real reform with a strong public option, but neither is it reason to slack off and wait until Congress gets back to work after Labor Day.

Your Senators and Representatives are going to be home for a month, wandering around holding town halls and pretending to care what you think. So let 'em know!

In the meantime, there are still two weeks before the recess, and given the events of the last week, almost anything can happen. So keep the pressure on:

Here's a quick way to get to the contact information for your elected officials. (Scroll down to box on the right labelled "My Elected Officials" and enter your zip code.)

Alternatively, Max at Firedoglake explains how to put recalcitrant congress critters up against the wall - the Facebook wall.

And if you need a corrective to the gloom-and-doom in the liberal blogosphere, Kevin Drum has some encouraging words:

I'm not sure there's much that can be done about this, but there's more than one way to look at it anyway. The first way is the conventional one: Republicans are hoping that the August recess will slow things down. It gives them more time for attack ads, more time to manufacture uncertainty, and more time to drive wedges between unsteady allies on the pro-reform side.

That's all true. But the main thing that happens during the August recess is that everyone in Washington goes home and talks to people in their district. If their constituents are largely opposed to healthcare reform, it hurts the cause. But if they're pissed off about the status quo and want to know why Congress can't get off its butt and do something — well, that can actually speed things up.

Now, that's not normally what happens. And it won't this time either — unless Barack Obama's army of supporters are still ready to go out and answer the call of reform. I've long been skeptical about whether his famous electoral machine would continue to work after the campaign was over, but if there was ever a time to prove me wrong, it's now. If Obama's army is still willing to go out and do battle, they should show up now and start putting the fear of God into their congressmen. If that happens, the August recess will be the best thing that ever happened to healthcare reform.

I wouldn't bet the farm on that happening. But congressmen listen to their constituents when they go home for the holidays, and there's no reason reform advocates can't use that to their advantage. It all depends on whether we're really as motivated and as angry as the opposition. Are we?

Don't assume your representative and senators have already made up their minds or can't be persuaded by sustained public pressure. There's a big difference between voting against a bill with a public option and voting to support a filibuster to prevent that bill from coming to a vote in the Senate, or helping the Blue Dogs sabotage the public option in committee.

This game is nowhere near over, and before it is we'll need everybody to come off the bench.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....